Tag: reporting

The term Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) has become the de facto term for criminals, organisations and governments spending considerable time, effort and expertise attempting to gain access to another organisations data.

Now this is clearly not a new phenomenon as people with the resources to do so have always put time into getting the information they want using technical and non-technical techniques including;

The question is, has this problem suddenly become much larger and more of a concern, or is the new name and much of the news there to create fear and market security tools / services?

I am completely in favour of people having a common language, so giving a simple and agreed term to “criminals, organisations and governments spending considerable time, effort and expertise attempting to gain access to another organisations data.” is definitely a good thing. However this needs to be used with caution, so that the accusation of spreading unnecessary fear and uncertainty cannot be levied against the security industry.

For example how many of the attacks that are reported to have been launched from China by the Chinese government were actually launched from botnets in China enabled by the fact that users in the country have amongst the highest levels of unpatched machines in the world? I don’t know the answer but while reading for this article I found conflicting thoughts and statements on this topic.

There is clearly a need for clarity and openness, everyone in the security industry, and increasingly people not in the industry, are aware that there are many risks out there especially to machines without AV, and not kept patched up to date. The risk does however need to be fairly and realistically reported.

If a company is compromised, it is currently much less damaging to report it as an APT attack rather than owning up to some unpatched machines or a misconfigured firewall, or someone clicking on a phishing mail while logged in with administrative privileges etc.

Equally though when there is clear evidence of APT, this should be clearly reported, especially if in doing so the techniques used can be revealed to help protect other potential victims. Should government agents be clearly implicated, this should be reported as governments are supposed to be beholden to international laws and not behave in a criminal manner. I guess the same could and should be said of individuals and criminal organisations!

In short, clearly agreed universal terminology is a good thing to aid understanding and communication even if it is not describing something new, but clear and open reporting of threats is key if people are to make informed and correct decisions about the real risks and how much time and expense should go into mitigating them vs. other threats and business needs.

Future posts will cover exactly what APT is in more detail, and also ask is the cloud something new?